BIGGLES – SECRET AGENT

by Captain W. E. Johns

XIII. GINGER GOES BACK (Pages 202 – 228)

Ginger, the Professor and his son, Gustav, make their way to the churchyard. Ginger recovers the crowbar and prises open the stone slab and, at ten-thirty, they descend into the vault. Ginger tells his companions of the rendezvous with Biggles. The Professor, who is familiar with the area, knows the field. The Professor says he came to this area after receiving an anonymous letter signed “A Friend” telling him his wife was dead and his son, born after he left the country, was living in Prenzel. The Professor hired an agent to spy out the land for him; “Either the man was a rogue or else he was in the employ of my enemies”. Arranging to meet his son in Unterhamstadt as the Professor had often been there, he was apprehended, taken to the hotel and kept in a semi-conscious condition by means of drug injections. Once in the castle, he was ordered, under pain of death to go on with the work he had been undertaking for the British government. Gustav explains that knowing his father was in England, he had learn English and read English papers in the library at Prenzel. By chance he saw a report of the traffic accident and his father’s death. Gustav had read his father’s papers about the castle and the secret tunnels. The Grospu, the secret police, arrested Gustav and certified him insane and placed him in a mental home but he escaped disguising himself as a girl. He had only been in Unterhamstadt for two days when Biggles and Ginger arrived. He had gone to ask the Jewish undertaker questions and that was when he heard Biggles and Ginger talking to him. Gustav was in the churchyard looking for a tunnel that led the castle as his father’s papers contained information about them. Ginger asks if there is a tunnel from the vault to the castle and says he will go back and rescue his friend, Algy. Ginger says that if he is not back, they must go and meet Biggles at the field at precisely twenty minutes past twelve. The Professor pulls open a marble panel low on the wall and discloses a hole large enough to admit a man on hand and knees. Ginger travels down the tunnel only to find it blocked up with recent brickwork. Using the crowbar, Ginger makes a hole large enough to get through and finds himself in the tunnel which leads from the hotel to the castle. He heads towards the castle and after climbing up the fallen masonry by the door, Ginger goes back to the spy-hole to von Stalhein’s office. Here, Ginger hears von Stalhein berating his men in German, presumably for not finding the ‘Englanders’. Von Stalhein leaves the office and Ginger tries to find a secret entrance to the room. Using the crowbar, a large section of rotten woodwork panelling falls into the room. Ginger scrambles through the hole to put the panelling back and is then on the wrong side of it, in the room. Hearing footsteps returning, Ginger then goes to hide behind the tall door of the safe, which von Stalhein had left open. Ginger sees the Professor’s bottle of high explosive in the safe and takes both that and a pistol. Von Stalhein returns and telephones to have Algy bought to him. Algy arrives with two storm-troopers. Algy calls von Stalhein a liar and says he doesn’t have his friends as prisoners. Von Stalhein slams his fist down on his desk and the vibration causes the loose panel to fall into the room. Ginger jumps out of hiding with his pistol and has to shoot one of the storm-troopers who reaches for his revolver. Ginger tells Algy to lock the door and his does so; seconds later there is a hammering on the door. Algy and Ginger escape through the panel hole into the secret tunnel as the door is broken in. They get from there into the main tunnel and ward off pursuers by firing shots down the tunnel. Reaching the side tunnel to the vault, they go down it. The time is now quarter to twelve. Getting back into the vault, Ginger is relieved to see that the Beklinders have left for the rendezvous. Ginger sends Algy outside and then throws the bottle of explosive back down the tunnel. Running to the churchyard, at the top step Ginger is shot out like a champagne cork by the force of an explosion “so violent that to Ginger it felt like the end of the world”. Ginger and Algy then run off across the churchyard in the direction of the rendezvous. Catching up with the Beklinders, they can hear the sounds of a hue and cry in progress looking for them and the pursuers have dogs. They arrive at the rendezvous at twelve fifteen. Greyshirts are seen coming over the hill, silhouetted against the sky. “It looks as if we shall have to fight for it,” said Algy calmly. There is a soft pattering among the dry leaves under the trees and a dog growls.